On September 1, 1939, a train was scheduled to leave Prague for England to take 250 Jewish children away from mortal danger. This train did not have time to leave; it was delayed by the German occupation troops. On that day, the Second World War began, and England became a military enemy. But before that, several special trains left for London, and the organizers of this unprecedented operation managed to save from death 669 Jewish children released by their parents in England.

The main organizer was an unknown British man – a thirty-year-old London stockbroker named Nikolas Winton. His name became known to the world only in 1988. Winton kept silent all his life about his deed, and only after his wife found boxes with lists of some strange names in the attic of their house, he told his family about what he had been doing all 1939.

Seventy years later, the centenarian Sir Winton (for his services he was knighted by the Queen of Great Britain) met “his train” with the “children” he had saved and their descendants at Liverpool Station in London. Almost everything is as it was then.

And it started like this. In the early spring of 1939, a young British man named Winton was vacationing in the mountains of Switzerland. A friend who served in the British Embassy in Prague learned of the danger that the Jewish population was in after the Nazis entered Bohemia. He immediately abandoned all his business and went to Prague to organize the rescue of the children before it was too late.

Sir Nicholas Winton remembers:

– At Liverpool Station in London, I met every train from Prague. Things were pretty chaotic in Britain then; what I was doing was more like a business venture. You had to rescue a child – and at the same time find a family willing to take him in. Then you had to connect them, get a signature on a delivery receipt for the child – which was like receiving a commercial shipment – and escort him to his home.

The only difficulty was to obtain permission for the entry of children. The British Home Office would only grant permission for a child to enter if there was an English family who would agree to support them. At that time, we did not realize how much time we had to complete the whole operation.

If we had known how much time we had left, we wouldn’t have dared to arrange the last transportation with the kids. The whole thing was terrible. The last train that could not be sent is particularly memorable to me. It was supposed to be our biggest transport; we managed then to gather 250 children at the train station in Prague. All were already ready to go to England. But the main thing: we had the addresses of 250 English families who guaranteed that they would accept these children. However, we did not manage to get them out. We know nothing about their fate. We know something about one or two children from this transport who managed to escape, but the rest of the children died. The worst thing is that all these children were already on the train when the ban on its departure came – the war had begun.

I have met many of the saved children. Some of them have written books about their salvation, participated in TV movies on the subject, and many have succeeded in life. Unfortunately, I have not been able to meet all of them.

I would call this an operation, the best thing I’ve ever managed to do in my life. Other than that, there have been no great successes in my life. I don’t really like the fame that saving children has brought me: it seems to me to be a very natural, ordinary act. I had to work, however, without weekends, from morning till night. Events were developing rapidly at the time.

* * *

In the nineties, the whole world became aware of Winton’s feat. The first meeting with him, organized by BBC television, was attended by children who had been saved by Winton and who had already grown up. Among them were famous scientists, writers, journalists and military men. They had no idea who had saved their lives.

This was followed by Sir Winton’s solemn arrival in Prague, where President Vaclav Havel awarded him the Order of the White Lion, the highest Czech state award. There was also a meeting with the “children” living in Prague.

Documentary and feature films have been made about Nicholas Winton, schools and streets have been named after him. And now, on the day the “Winton train” left Prague, a monument to Winton was unveiled at the Prague train station. Its author is the English sculptor, Flor Kent. The train from Prague was escorted by the first persons of the Czech state; the signal for departure was given by Senator Prince Karel Schwarzenberg, the recent Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic. All along the train route in the Czech Republic, people stood and waved to the passengers as a sign of greeting and solidarity.

The train was pulled through Germany by a German historic steam locomotive, the first stop was in Nuremberg, where passengers stepped onto the platform. They were greeted by Federal Minister Kloser. He emphasized the symbolism of the meeting in Nuremberg, the city where the Nazis gathered for their meetings and where their leaders were later subjected to the trial of the nations.

Eighty-four-year-old Hana Beer, who now lives in New York City, remembers:

– I had a doll with me at the time, it was all I had left of my whole family. Nicholas? He’s my life, my closest person, he’s humanity itself.

Another story: Asaf. A boy born in Kibbutz Dganiya Bet. Zionist parents came to Palestine in the early 20s. They gave birth to two sons. They lived here for 10 or 12 years. And returned to Europe – because they never got used to the endless hot summer over the banks of the Kinneret. The whole family perished in Auschwitz. Only a boy named Asaf had survived…

After the war, many of the “Winton children” returned to Bohemia. But they did not find their loved ones there. Their houses and apartments were occupied by strangers, their belongings were stolen, and their new owners were unwilling to give them even a cup in memory of the dead family. Seeing that in their homeland they had become an unwelcome reminder of what had happened, some of them left back to England or even farther away – to America, Canada or Israel. Therefore, the current “Winton train” was predominantly English-speaking.